The teachings on emptiness (Pāli: suññatā, Sanskrit: śunyatā) can be one of the most philosophically difficult, but also rewarding and liberating, Dharma reflections. While it has an important place in the Early Buddhist teachings preserved in the Pāli Canon, such as in the "Shorter Discourse on Emptiness" (MN 121), emptiness comes into full flower in the teachings of the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajñāpāramitā), the root of the Mahāyāna ("Great Vehicle") school and later lineages like Zen and Vajrayāna.
For our Dharma reflection this month, Erin Treat and Pamela Weiss weave together practice and understanding about emptiness from both the Theravāda and Mahāyāna lineages they carry, revealing the heart of emptiness practice as an accessible yet deeply transformative gateway to insight and liberation.
Erin and Pamela are co-teaching Deep Dive Dharma: Liberation and the Sure Heart's Release, a nine-month online exploration of essential Buddhist teachings of liberation, September 2024 - May 2025.
Emptiness is a Gateway to the Awakened Heart
Erin Treat
I love the teachings on emptiness. I know the word “empty” can sound a little dry or even cerebral, but emptiness truly is a gateway to the awakened heart. Emptiness practice has the function of melting the ways I can take myself to be separate or independent. Emptiness has the flavor of the sacred. This quality of nature points directly toward the mystery that beckons us ever more deeply into this path.
A simple way of exploring the practice of emptiness is to just notice what we are trained to habitually perceive and not perceive. For example, sitting here, it’s easy for me to see the background setting where I am, to notice the colors of what I’m seeing, and the objects in the room. But often we’re not well-practiced to perceive the presence of space. And yet space is right here. We can cognize the presence of space. As we open to perceiving both objects and space, there’s an invitation to abide in a much more alive world—a world that doesn’t give clinging much of a ground to stand on.
For emptiness to not be an abstraction or just an idea, it must be investigated and understood through our own experience. As we do this investigation, we come to know emptiness much more personally. Many of us have personal experiences of emptiness that we do not talk about, and there can be a real richness in sharing the flavors of the experience of emptiness. For me, one way that I know emptiness is in wild nature. Practicing at Vallecitos, the high mountain center where I teach, there is such expansiveness and clarity, I feel all my concepts converging into a coherent, living field; something much more imminent, much freer. Others perceive emptiness in the dissolving of fixed ideas about themselves, or within mindful relationships that open insights into selflessness and interconnection.
I feel strongly that teachings on emptiness are a medicine that is profoundly needed in our world at this pivotal time. Emptiness is a medicine of remembering, of opening to a deeper experience of who and what we are—one that allows us to respond skillfully to changing conditions. Emptiness has an intelligence about it. It is awake, aware and alive.
In emptiness practice, we are always in the presence of a paradox that is onward leading. We are invited to be continually curious about what keeps separative consciousness and our felt sense of separateness intact. When we look deeply, the fundamental confusion we carry in our not-yet-fully-awake human hearts is mainly perpetuated by thinking. To consciously engage the teachings of emptiness is a beautiful returning, a merciful and tender way of practicing with and in our beautiful, aching world.
Emptiness as a Heart Practice
Pamela Weiss
Although emptiness is a very precise teaching, in its essence it is a shift in orientation—a radical shift in perspective. And that radical shift is the heart of the teaching. In the Mahāyāna text, the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, the Buddha teaches, “things are not as they seem, nor are they otherwise” (Lkv 3.65.37). Within this paradox, we are asked to reorient our relationship to ourselves, each other, the world. Emptiness is a doorway for that reorientation to happen.
One way to think about the trajectory from the Theravāda to the Mahāyāna is as a shift from anattā, the teachings on no separate, solid self, to śunyatā, the more all-encompassing teachings that there is no separate solid anything—that everything is empty. There’s not a sharp divide between not-self and the emptiness of everything, because both teachings are based on the big breakthrough the Buddha had in his awakening. He was looking for something solid and couldn’t find it. Instead, he found that the concepts of “I, me, and mine” were empty of inherent existence. That was already a radical insight. Then later in the Mahāyāna, there’s a flowering of this initial insight into the understanding that not only is what’s here empty, but there's nothing solid anywhere. In my experience, that is much more frightening, much more profound.
As Erin described, the wisdom side of emptiness is understanding absence. It's the “no, no, no” side of seeing clearly what isn’t. The Mahāyāna expands this foundational insight about absence into the experience of non-separation. I think of these as two sides of the same teaching. When we enter the wisdom door, we see absence. When we enter the compassion door we see interconnection. The teaching of anattā, not-self, helps us recognize that we are not isolated little selves bumping up against each other. The teaching of non-separateness reveals that we are part of a living web of being.
In the Zen monastery where I trained, every morning we chanted the Heart Sūtra—an abbreviated version of the Prajñāpāramitā (Perfection of Wisdom) teachings on emptiness. The opening line of the Heart Sūtra begins: “Avalokiteśvara Bodhisattva when deeply practicing Prajñāpāramitā clearly saw that all five aggregates are empty and thus relieved all suffering.” This is the extension of the Buddha’s initial insight that our sense of “I, me, and mine” comprises the five aggregates (Pāli: khandha, Sanskrit: skandha)—form, feeling, perception, cognition, and consciousness. The Heart Sūtra says: the aggregates are empty, too. And right there we find relief from suffering. Right there we find the ease and the spaciousness Erin was pointing to.
For a long time, I really felt it was important to understand the aggregates. I thought if I could just understand emptiness in this way, I too could have ease—I too could be free from suffering. It took a long time for me to understand there is a secret teaching in that opening line of the Sūtra. The secret is revealed when we ask: “What is it that wakes up?” It’s compassion! It’s the Mahāyāna figure Avalokiteśvara Bodhisattva, who the Chinese call Kuan Yin, and who is associated with infinite compassion. That’s what wakes up.
In this way, we see that the teachings on emptiness are really a deep heart practice; that emptiness is a doorway to the awakening of compassion. Because when we realize our fundamental non-separateness, then as we say in Zen, “In all the world there’s no place to spit.” Then we honor the world, we are the world, we recognize the holiness of the world, we take care of the world. For me, this vision of the truth of our interdependence is essential to healing our world right now. When we practice with the teachings on emptiness, we open to a revolutionary vision that could have an enormous impact because it changes how we relate to everything.
